Sunday Night Overnight Open Thread (9/10/17)

(Americana at its best)

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Quotes of The Day

Quote I

The business changes. The technology changes. The team changes. The team members change. The problem isn't change, per se, because change is going to happen; the problem, rather, is the inability to cope with change when it comes. Kent Beck

Quote II

I am not now
That which I have been.Lord Byron

Quote III

Faced with problems and disappointments, many people will try to escape from their responsibility: escape in selfishness, escape in sexual pleasure, escape in drugs, escape in violence, escape in indifference and cynical attitudes. But today, I propose to you the option of love, which is the opposite of escape. Pope John Paul II

Quote IV

"We know what real democracy constitutes; we understand its implications. It means the rule of law for the leaders as well as the people. It involves limitations on the power of the state over the people. It means orderly debate and meaningful votes. It means liberation of the captive people from the thralls of a ruling elite that presumes to know the people's good better than the people." Ronald Reagan

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) on Wednesday asked terror experts for answers on how to combat the rise of white nationalists, as she has been fielding death threats from extremists.

“What can we do to deal with the KKK, the white nationalists, the extremists, the alt-right?” Waters, who serves as ranking member of the House Committee on Financial Services, asked during a Subcommittee on Terrorism and Illicit Finance hearing. “They’re on the internet, they’re Breitbart. If you look at the YouTube, you see how much they want to kill me and others. What can we do?”

The program found that gay men and women tended to have gender-atypical facial morphology, expression, and grooming styles. That means that both their chosen features and their biologically determined features are less like straight members of their gender, and often more masculine in women and more feminine in men.

Just thinking out loud here. Presently, they can determine whether or not an unborn baby has Downs Syndrome and abortions take place because of this. Is the next medical advance to develop a test for gayness? If a fetus is aborted because it has Downs I can see a fetus being aborted because it is Gay.

To any of you who have been around here for a while, what’s the first rule of bullshit detection?

Okay, other than ‘if you can smell it on your shoe, get a towel’?

My rule is: If you have to ask, it’s probably bullshit.

Doesn’t it just smell like bullshit that low calorie sweeteners all seem to keep being blamed for the same cluster of problems, and they’re not chemically similar at all? There’s no good reason to suspect they’re causing the same issues solely based on this shared perceived property of making iced coffee taste like a butterfly punching you in the tongue… lovingly.

The ONT Musical Interlude

September 10, 1898, Born on this day, Waldo Semon, invented vinyl in 1926, which was used to make LP and 45 records. Died on 26th May 1998 aged 100. via thisdayinmusic.com

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1973, The BBC banned The Rolling Stones single 'Star Star', from their Goat's Head Soup album because it contained the word "Star-fucker" in the chorus a dozen times. via thisdayinmusic.com

September 10, 1964, The Kinks third single 'You Really Got Me', was at No.1 on the UK singles chart. Future Led Zeppelin founder and guitarist Jimmy Page played tambourine on the track. via thisdayinmusic.com

It’s great to be smart, but intelligence is a hard thing to pin down. In many cases, how smart people think you are is just as important as how smart you actually are.

As it turns out, intelligence only explains about 20% of how you do in life; much of the other 80% comes down to emotional intelligence (EQ). EQ is a skill that’s so important that 90% of top performers in the workplace have high EQs and people with high EQs make $28,000 more annually than those with low EQs.

"RJR and its recruiting agents relied on the resume guidelines under which RJR hired almost exclusively younger individuals to fill [its] positions," the agency said in a brief filed to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. "The Commission has long interpreted this language to authorize disparate-impact-based challenges to practices adversely affecting applicants.

The court rejected that argument, saying the Age Discrimination in Employment Act only applied to current, rather than prospective, employees.

"The whole text of the Act makes clear that an applicant for employment cannot sue an employer for disparate impact because the applicant has no ‘status as an employee,'" the ruling said.

At first glance, nothing seems particularly odd about the December 1896 edition of The Druggists Circular and Chemical Gazette, a catalog of products that any self-respecting pharmacy ought to carry. But look closer: Hiding among medical necessities like McElroy's glass syringes and Hirsh Frank & Co's lab coats, you’ll find some more curious finds—including Hershey's cocoa powder.